Lee Daniels' The Butler

The folks here at Indiewire have made our opinion of Steve McQueen's racially-charged true story "12 Years a Slave" pretty clear: We love it. Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn gave the film an A+ after its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, saying "McQueen turns a topic rendered distant by history i...

Icon U.K. Group CEO
Aviv Giladi and the founder of New Sparta Ltd, Dr Jerome Booth recently announced that New Sparta has acquired Icon Film Distribution (IFD), the U.K. distribution operation of Icon U.K. Group, in association with a management team led by
Ian Dawson, Chief Executive Officer, and...

The Oprah Winfrey Network has secured TV rights to "Lee Daniels' The Butler," which had a boffo theatrical release in August via the Weinstein Company, and recently passed the $100 million mark. The film stars Forest Whitaker as longtime White House butler Cecil Gaines, and Winfrey as his wife. Both...

This post-Labor Day weekend, normally a graveyard for box office, with rare major new films opening among late-August holdovers, Vin Diesel's "Riddick" posted a much bigger-than-usual gross. The top 10 took in around $63 million, low for most of the year but high for this weekend. Last year's total ...

Forget the September doldrums. Sony's Brit boy band 3-D concert film "One Direction" was a solid number one. And major support came from four strong holdovers: "The Butler," "We're the Millers," "Planes" and "Elysium." All told, the three days will come in with about $84 million for the top 10, up $...

Lee Daniels' The Butler is some serious, probably effective Oscar bait. It is also -- these things so often go together -- audience-pandering History Lite. Forest Whitaker, as a butler who serves at the White House through eight Presidents, from Eisenhower to Reagan, gives a dazzling performance; he...

The end of season returns show that audiences can be satisfied with something beyond just the more hyped franchise entries that dominated most of the last few months, many of which failed to satisfy over a period when increased total grosses came with higher budgets. "The Butler" and "We're the Mill...